The digital ad space can feel overwhelming and complicated. What kind of ad do you use? Why should you consider running ads on social media in the first place? This week, Tim Lambertson and Kelli Frazier continue to answer those questions in Part 2 of Demystifying Digital Ads! Taking us deeper, they talk about the importance of the creative aspect of the ads we put out. They cover the type of format to use, the process of Facebook’s ad auction, measuring and managing your ad, and the difference between reach and impressions. Follow along to this great and insightful episode as Tim and Kelli reiterate the need to think, do, measure, and measure again.
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Demystifying Digital Ads, Part 2
What do you say we demystify now?
Let’s do it.
Are you feeling mystified or are you feeling mystical?
I am feeling mystical.
If you’re feeling mystical out there, we can help you because this is part two of Demystifying Digital Ads.
It’s a lot of mystery.
Probably the most mysterious thing that’s happening out there is performance marketing. We want to pick up where we left off from the first episode and continue demystifying digital ads. Tune in as we’re going to tackle part two. This will be a little bit shorter than the previous part one of this but if you hung in there and you read part one, congratulations. Here comes part two.
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We’re ready to tackle part two of Demystifying Digital Ads. We often feel mystical when we sit down and start this show but now, we’re going to demystify. We’re excited to tackle a big and thick subject. I think we can expedite part two. We tackled a lot in part one. I’m going to start by recapping a little bit of what we learned from part one and then we can tackle this part. Before we get going, what’s new? What is happening? We want to know what’s going on with you.
In my adventures of parenthood, I once again got humbled and rookie of the year as per usual. I woke up to my son’s first epic nosebleed to the point where I felt like I was witnessing a horror scene all the while trying to maintain a calm face for a three-year-old that’s looking to me to gauge if this is a problem or not. Imagine the scene where he calls my name then I walked into his bedroom. He is sitting in a pool of bloody sheets, clothes, everything, and is looking at me to gauge like, “Is this a problem?” He was like, “I have a lot of goop.” I wanted to give one of those terrific screams from a horror movie but I did not. I was like, “It’s totally fine. Everything’s completely under control. Let’s get you cleaned up.” In the back of my head, I’m like, “Do I call 911? What happened?”
What did happen? Why was his nose bleeding?
[bctt tweet=”Think, do, measure, and then think, do, and measure again.” username=”lmstheagency”]
Fellow mothers that have many more children than me said it’s a common thing and probably from the air condition.
Here’s something that’ll make your nose bleed. We’re going to talk more about digital ads. If you recall, we went through a lot in the first version of this. To give a brief overview of some of the things that we talked about. We talked about why do we want to run a digital ad? We covered that and we want to run digital ads because we want to drive revenue. We want to make money and sell products. We’re going to use ads to do that. We talked about the differences between a dark ad and a boosted ad. I’d say we demystified the heck out of that which always seems to be something that we have to talk about.
Organic versus paid.
We then started diving into Instagram Ads Manager or Facebook Ads Manager. We walked through that. We walked through what is a pixel. We got into step two, which was the how-to part of creating a Facebook ad. We talked about all the different reasons why you would create a Facebook ad, what are some of the settings that you can choose and that took us to set a budget. We talked a little bit about setting a budget.
We went into where you have some money to spend and we’re going to decide whether or not we want to set a daily budget or a lifetime budget against an ad and the period of time over which we are going to let our ad run. If anybody out there has any questions about any number of things that we’ve talked about, please reach out to us. Send us an email, send us some messages over social media and we’re more than happy to help you and walk you through that.
We talked about building your audience. We were going to choose an ad target. I always like to use the reference, “We are not going to sell beef jerky to vegans.” That’s a bad idea. You do not want to spend your money there. We’re both plant-based and I think we can say that if we’ve got a jerky ad, it wouldn’t work on me. We went into low key things, the levers that you can pull. Location, demographics, interests, behavior, connections, etc. and we’re going to decide where you want to run that ad.
Do you want to run that ad on Facebook? Do you want to run that ad on Instagram? Do you want to run it on both? Do you want to run it on messengers or specific groups? All of these things are areas where you can run your ad and how to target that ad highly. Thanks for sticking with me as we go through this recap here. We’ve now gotten to a place where we’re picking our audience network. We are going to place your ads. You’re going to run Facebook ads, you’re going to do mobile apps, or you’re going to pick websites that are affiliated with Facebook and all of the different levers that you can pull when you’re in the Facebook ads manager.
That leads us into a topic that we didn’t get to and if I did, maybe I don’t remember, but it is the format. I think that one of the things that I said in the first episode, but I’ll reiterate here is when you talk to anyone in performance marketing, 50% of the success of an ad is going to come from the creative. That’s an important thing to keep in mind that although you may have pulled the right levers and you may have targeted the correct audience, if the ad does not look good or the audience is not responding to it or the format is not right, then you’re not going to have a successful ad. This is why you hear people talk about things like ad sets A/B Testing, test, iterate, think, do, and measure.
What they’re talking about is they think that they’ve targeted the right audience and what their testing is how is ad A versus ad B? If ad A is working and ad B doesn’t work, then you stick with ad A. You run that for as long as that works until you find another ad set or you see some deterioration in the numbers that you’re doing then it’s time to come up with a new piece of creative. There are different formats for running an ad. The most common ones would be a photo, a video and you can also do a gallery post, you can also call that a carousel post.
You can also run Stories. You can run ads on Messenger. Messenger ads help people start conversations with their business. You can do a slide show. You can run a collection and the collection is something interesting. It’s an ad that lets people discover or browse by all of the different items that you have and people can tap an ad and learn more about a specific product. I’ve seen them a lot in fashion. You can run almost a look book ad, and people can scroll through it and be like, “I want this summer white blazer. This one speaks to me.”
You can scroll through the collection and see what’s on there. They work well and then there are playables. A playable ad offers people an interactive preview before they download an app. I think that’s specific to app download if you go to your favorite app download store and you’re interested in an app and curious about it, especially with games. You see a lot with games and efficiency programs for business. You see an animated video of what this will look like and what it will do.
It’s important then based on what your business is or what your product is to align with the correct format along with creative and finding the right format. You are a big proponent of video.
I’m a huge proponent of video. I think more than anything, video ads are going to work the best.
It gets you the most engagement.
They autoplay. You’re immediately gripped into watching something. I think that’s important to understand. More and more, people are turning to video. The first three seconds of that video are probably the most important thing and the video itself is exciting. It’s more dynamic. It’s better to watch.
It captures your attention.
I’m a huge advocate for video in terms of organic social media and also on paid. That leads us to the next section, which is placing your order. Once you submit your ad, it goes to Facebook’s ad auction which helps get it in front of the right people. A person can fall into multiple target audiences. Facebook uses auctions to decide which ad gets served. These auctions take into consideration three things. It takes into consideration a bid, estimated action rates and ad quality. All three of those are measured inside of Facebook and that is a determiner in getting your ad out.
Who is bidding?
You are bidding against others who are also placing an ad in front of that target audience. That takes us to an interesting place, which is step three. Once it’s live, we’ve made it. We’ve posted an ad and it was a big moment.
When we talk to clients about this, the first time it goes live there’s this radio silence where you’re waiting to be like, “What’s going to happen? Are people engaging?” You’re watching it to see.
[bctt tweet=”Messenger ads help people converse with your business.” username=”lmstheagency”]
You can get addicted.
You check back and check back.
I also think we should probably talk to people. I love organic social media. I love paid. I think it’s going to be an interesting conversation to have. You are easily sucked into the sexiness of data reporting when it comes to paid digital ads. “I’ve spent $100. Did I make $200? Did I make $300? What’s my ROI? What’s my return on my advertising spent? Give me data.” Sometimes you can get sucked into that vortex and it’s not always that easy. You can get lost in spending all of your time on performance marketing. There’s a lot of nuances in that. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole, but it’s interesting.
I think setting some parameters around it, like in speaking about that, you can go down the rabbit hole because data, as you say, begets data and get lost as to what the original goal was and what benchmarks you’re trying to set for yourself. I think having some parameters around how you’re evaluating the data is important and always laddering back to the goal of the ad, to begin with. The further down you get in the dataset, you can get a little bit lost in the why and what the result was meant to be.
That’s a great statement that data begets data. We talk about that all the time when we’re going into review sales figures or marketing numbers or anything. You want to turn every stone and uncover it. You and I have been through this when we’ve been talking about uncovering certain data points especially when it’s related to sales and sales time.
Looking at things from multiple lenses.
I think what we landed on was quite smart of us, which phase it out. Maybe in phase one it’s, “What are the three things that we’re looking for?” Once we’ve uncovered that data, then you can move on to phase 2 and phase 3 or however many phases you have and however deep you want to go down the data rabbit hole. That takes us to step three and here’s our big moment. We’ve posted it. We’ve made an ad. We’ve got it up. It is running. We’ve spent money and now things are happening and we’re wondering why we’re not rich yet. That ad’s been running for ten minutes.
It’s like, “Where are my results?”
Now we’re at step three, measure and manage your ad. I like the statement think, do, measure and then think, do, and measure again. That’s what informs measuring and managing your app. Both boosted content dark ads can be monitored through Facebook Ads Manager. There are metrics that are going to be helpful in monitoring your ad and your ad performance. The metrics help you gauge your success or decide whether or not you want to keep or change an ad based on the ad’s objective. You get to use things called Facebook Ads Manager labels. You can label things using a campaign name. A campaign name might be like, “New product, add one.”
It can be Mother’s Day promo 2020.
That might be Mother’s Day promo 2020 V1.0 because you might run several different ad sets for Mother’s Day.
Why is that important to rename?
It’s important to rename so that you can differentiate between ad 1 and ad 2 or ad A and ad B.
Also, to compare results. If you don’t do that, then it will be labeled as the objective.
It’s like labeling files. If I send you a PDF and you know that we’re going to make some edits and I send you a PDF and it’s called a Tim Project and now you have edited it.
I tack my initials at the end of it.
You do that and then now there might be V1 of that. Now, I make an edit and I send it back over to you. I need to make sure that that’s labeled V2.
It’s a way to keep up with what’s going on, keep things organized, and then ultimately as you do more and more of these, be able to go back and compare.
Campaign names, unless renamed, ad campaigns will be labeled as the objective of the campaign. An example would be for web traffic. It’s best to rename all the ad campaigns with date, details and objectives so that you can easily track it and use it as a reference. We then have the delivery. Delivery indicates whether or not the ad is delivering to users. You can use the toggle function to the left. When you’re in the ads manager, you use this toggle function to pause campaigns and stop delivering. Delivery is like, “My ad is being delivered like a pizza to the audience.”
You can then stop delivering pizzas, you can change the pizza or whatever it is to use this weird pizza analogy. Active is you’re actively delivering pizzas. Completed means that you’re out of pizza. You’ve delivered all the pizza and you’re out of dough. There’s then completed and you can turn it off. There is a bid strategy. A bid strategy indicates how Facebook is deciding who gets to see the content. For example, that might be like the lowest cost and then you can move on to something like the budget. In the budget, we talked about that indicates your daily or lifetime budget of the ad.
[bctt tweet=”More than anything, video ads are going to work the best and get the most engagement.” username=”lmstheagency”]
You’re saying that once you’ve determined all these things, they’re still levers that you can pull as the ad is ongoing. Are we saying though that once it goes live, that we’re keeping an active look on all of these things and making changes as we go?
You can tune in and you can see the amount that you’ve spent. A lot of times there are different factors that determine how much you’ve spent, but you get to monitor that and you can see how much I’ve spent and what the success rate has been. At that point, you can decide whether or not you want to stop it.
If it is performing well, you could layer in more budget or if it hasn’t, you could call it quits and move on. You’re not stuck with it once you’ve decided.
Another example might be we’ve been running an ad for a while, but the money hasn’t been spent and you wonder why. Not a lot of people have clicked it and actions have not been taken on it. Something’s wrong and I think it’s time to stop so now it’s time to reevaluate. While you’re monitoring budget and you’re monitoring the timeline over which the ad will be running, you have an end date like any old thing. You can indicate when the ad is going to stop and run.
You can change that.
You’re not going to be running your ad campaign for Mother’s Day into Father’s Day. You do want to cut it off. Your Facebook Ads Manager is going to give you some metrics and the metric names are common for anybody that’s done digital ads before. For example, you’re going to get reach impressions and frequency. These are things that you see all the time. Those terms get tossed around a lot.
I also think they get interchanged a bit. People get confused about the difference between reach and impressions. Can we break that down a little bit? I get a lot of questions about the difference between reach and impressions and which is better and why. I think it’s good to break it down.
Reach indicates how many unique users the ad was delivered to. To reiterate, unique users are different people. Impressions, sometimes impressions are easily understood as you’ve impressed upon somebody. Impressions indicate how many times the ad was delivered overall and some users will be delivered the same ad multiple times. You are now impressing upon somebody several times. There’s then the frequency and that estimates how many times a single user is delivered that ad content.
I’m not going to get into where we should be. We’re simply demystifying definitions. In parts 7, 8, 9, and 10, we’ll cover all of these. You then get a cost per result and that indicates how much each desired result costs the campaign. For example, if your objective was traffic and your desired result was link clicks. It’ll indicate how much each of those clicks cost based on the budget. That’s an important thing to understand and monitor so that you want a lot of traffic for as little money as possible. You also get unique link clicks and this is going to indicate how many times the link in your ad was clicked.
It’s because it can be served up to someone but not engaged with or no one clicks the link.
Link clicks are important. It’s probably the thing that’s going to get somebody to go to a shopping cart and if your ad is not getting clicks, then something’s wrong and you’re going to want to think, do and measure again. You can always start and you’re going to be testing. You’re in the zone and now we are testing the success of our ads and measuring how successful they are by all of the different metrics that the Facebook Ads Manager is going to serve back up to you.
Facebook specifically allows you to A/B Test ads and ad sets to learn how to best reach your target audience and which target audience is the most receptive to your content. This is important. When you are able to target a smaller segment of the audience with something that you know is specifically for a subset of people, like for example, “Super absorbent nose bleed tissues.” It would be relevant for young moms with young kids.
You’re saying that the more targeted you can get, the smaller the group. Meaning the demographic is right for you that you’ve eliminated most of the people that would immediately be like, “I don’t need that.” I have a question. For A/B Testing, for those of us that don’t do that, what does that mean? Running two different ads at the same time?
You can do that.
It could be one right after the other but wanting to do something different enough to where you can evaluate.
We as marketers and people who are running ads can use a lot of common sense to figure out who their product is for. For the sake of the argument early on that, I’m not going to sell jerky sticks to vegans. I’m also not going to sell meat and meat patties and anything that’s non-vegan to vegans. It’s a bad idea. It’s not going to work. At the same time, I’m not going to sell products that are right for females. I’d like to cut out the male audience.
Also, products for kiddos to people that don’t have children. Above that, do you have recommendations about how to land on doing the A/B Testing with creative that’s different enough? I think sometimes people have a hard time understanding like, “If I have creative, then I’m sold on and I feel good about it, then I’m going to do this.” What we’re saying is there’s some real advantage to having two things and being able to evaluate. What we see a lot in our business and in our work with our clients is that often you get surprised. The thing you think is going to perform off the charts and the creative is gorgeous it does not perform as well as something that maybe isn’t as polished or is a little more casual or off the cuff. Let’s demystify that a little bit because I do think we get a lot of questions around, “We hired this photographer. We got this great creative. It’s super polished.” They’re a little bit surprised when we say we think we should also try some UGC.
This is a great spotlight on influencer marketing. It’s something that we know and do well and understand the ins and outs. We’ve taken influencer photography or user-generated content. UGC is User-Generated Content. When an influencer or a content creator creates a piece of content, it looks like user-generated content. If I like a product and let’s say it’s a new protein bar and I don’t have a lot of followers on social media. I’m not an influencer. I’m stoked on it and I want my friends and family and people to know. I take a picture and I’m like, “I ate this protein bar now. It was delicious. I then went and ran a marathon. It was my fastest time.” That’s convincing. My lighting is a little yellow or it’s not perfectly placed, but that picture comes across as authentic. It’s real because it was real. When an influencer creates a piece of photography, they also are creating something that’s real whether that’s a video or a photo.
A lot of times too, I think it incorporates a personal use case that wouldn’t necessarily be shown in a studio setting. It does add that level of real-life on the other side.
The audience out there is getting savvy. There’s a number of factors here that are at play when you’re running ads. One is who are you advertising to? If you’re looking to advertise to Millennials and Gen Zers, that generation has grown up skipping Netflix ads. They have grown up not having to wait through five minutes of commercials while watching their favorite show. They’re also savvy enough to have their phone out, their laptop open, the tablet open and the TV on.
As soon as an ad comes on, “I’ll look at my phone and then if my phone has an ad, then I’ll look at my tablet and then I’m going to text and take a photo and shoot a video while monitoring my Snap Story.” All these things are happening simultaneously. When we go back to the point that we’re discussing here and I take a well put together studio photography ad or shoot a video, there’s a lot that goes into those ads. Ad agencies get paid millions of dollars to be able to produce that content. More importantly, what we’re saying here is we want to add to A/B Test because something that you didn’t think that looked the part is going to work well.
[bctt tweet=”Data begets data.” username=”lmstheagency”]
It can surprise you. It’s less polished. It can differ, so I think it’s where the value of A/B Testing comes in is that you do try it and see what resonates best with your target audience, because it may surprise you. I think having that information is empowering and it certainly informs how you continue on in the ad space.
With A/B testing, you can build similar or many differentiated ads.
It can be radically different or similar but I think the value of testing is critical. I think it’s good to know that you could be surprised in a good way.
Let’s bring this all the way back to the top. Testing, think, do, measure or test, iterate or however you want to think about that is great for organic. It is great for ads. It is great for everything. It’s great for relationships. I can phrase it one way and my wife gets aggravated or I can phrase it another way and everything is perfectly great. When it comes to social media and when it comes to running ads or identifying the organic content that’s going to work well, you have to test and measure.
We’re talking about an ever-changing landscape so you have to.
We got through Demystifying Ads part two. That was a thick topic. I worry sometimes at the end of these, should I go back and fact check all of the things that I have learned or everything that I’ve presented? Maybe we’ll do that. For the audience out there who’s reading, if I have messed anything up, great. I will fall on my sword. Let me know and send me a message and say, “You screwed this up and you got to own it.” I’m going to own it and I’ll post about it and I’ll make a video about it. We can revisit any of that.
When all is said and done, we’re hopeful that this is helpful to you out there. Please reach out to us on social @LMSTheAgency. You can find Kelli on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find our agency on LinkedIn and we’re always here to help. Let us know what questions you have. Let us know if there’s any other content that you want to see and we are happy to present that to you. We’re always here for you. Thank you for reading the blog.
Thank you.
Important Links:
- Episode – Past episode
- @LMSTheAgency – We Are LMS
- LinkedIn – Kelli Frazier
- LinkedIn – Tim Lambertson
- LinkedIn – LMS The Agency